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Category Archives: Appetizers

Searching for a delicious kid-friendly appetizer? Look no further! We made these delicious pizza crescent rolls appetizers for the big game last year and they were perfect. I mean come on, who does not love pepperoni pizza or crescent rolls? Put the two together and you have a snack that young and old will enjoy.

The way to make these is pretty similar to my pesto sausage crescent rolls. All you need is pizza sauce, crescent rolls pepperoni and cheese (I used a mix of cheddar and mozzarella).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. On a piece of parchment paper, roll out the crescent rolls into a large sheet. Overlap and pinch any seams to make one large connected sheet of dough.

Spread on a coating of pizza sauce, leave about 1/2 an inch of dough uncovered at top and bottom longwise.

Next layer on a small amount of cheese (not all of your cheese, just about 1/3 of it).

Top with a layer of pepperoni slices. I spread mine out perfectly to make sure there was even coverage.

Add the rest of the cheese on top to make it nice and cheesy.

Starting from one of the long sides, begin rolling this into a log. Since you left the extra 1/2 inch un-sauced, the dough can seal to itself and keep the log closed.

Toss into the refrigerator or freezer for a few minutes to make the log easier to cut into slices. In the meantime, spray your cookie sheet with cooking spray to prevent sticking.

Cut the log into slices about a half inch thick and spread out on cookie sheet. Pop into the oven for about 8-10 minutes or until cooked and golden brown.

Serve and enjoy. A classy way to enjoy pizza as an appetizer. Check out more of my appetizer recipes here.

One of my favorite meals to eat growing up was fried chicken tenders. They are SO GOOD!! I love fried chicken, but can get weirded out by tendons or bones or strange texture pieces, so this is the perfect way to enjoy fried chicken for me. These little guys can be served as an appetizer or as a meal with a side. While they are great paired with mashed potatoes or mac ‘n cheese, you can lighten them up by serving with a salad or some fruit.

Ingredients:

1 bag frozen chicken tenders (completely thawed)

2 cups all purpose flour

2 tablespoons garlic salt

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1/2 tablespoon Season All

1 teaspoon black pepper

Vegetable Oil

In a medium size bowl, mix together flour, garlic salt, garlic powder, season all and pepper. I like my chicken salty and flavorful, but you can adjust the amount of seasoning to taste.

Taking one tender at a time, rinse in water and dip into the flour mixture.

Flip it around and pat down to make sure you get a nice coating on all sides.

Set aside onto a plate and continue until all chicken tenders are coated. Reserve the flour mixture for now as you may want to re-dip the chicken before frying if you see missing or wet spots in the coating.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, add about a 1/2 inch of oil. Test oil with a pinch of flour to make sure it is hot enough before adding chicken. Cook on the first side for 3-5 minutes, or until it starts to set and become golden.

Flip and cook the opposite side.

You may want to flip one more time if the first side does not get crispy enough. You do not need to worry about cooking it through, but you want to make sure you have a nice crispy coating on all sides.

Remove chicken from skillet and set on paper towels to absorb the excess oil. Repeat with all remaining pieces of chicken.

Place chicken in oven safe glass baking dishes in a single layer. Pop into the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until cooked through. Try to flip part way through, but make sure to be careful to not rip the coating off. If they are stuck to the pan too much and soggy, then they are not quite ready to flip yet.

Remove from oven and back onto a paper towel to absorb any more oil.

Serve and enjoy! A great game day appetizer or dinner plan. Happy Mealtime Monday!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! There are some things in life that will always make me giddy with excitement, and one of those is our family’s dill dip recipe. It is so simple, but one of those things that we only make around the holidays for some reason. Imagine me doing the food dance in the kitchen while eating an entire bowl of this to myself. That is probably what I am doing right now as you are reading this, because this dill dip recipe is seriously that good.

Not only delicious, but ridiculously easy too.

Ingredients:

2 cups sour cream

2 cups mayonnaise

3 tablespoons dried parsley

3 tablespoons minced onion flakes

3 teaspoons dried dill weed

3 teaspoons beau monde

Mix all the ingredient together in a large bowl. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving. Trust me, the dip is better once chilled so that the dried herbs are not crunchy. Serve with your choice of veggies, cracker or bread. I prefer carrots, celery and bell pepper as my dipping weapons of choice. I am so excited for the Holidays can can’t wait to be gorging on all the amazing food. Wishing you and your loved ones a Happy Thanksgiving

This mealtime monday is all about wings; crispy baked asian chicken wings. I found the recipe a while back on Pinterest from Just a Taste and we finally got around to giving it a try. I love chicken wings and 99% of the time we do buffalo wings with Frank’s Red Hot. YUM! So this was a nice change of pace.

*I am not a fan of Chinese 5-Spice because of the Anise in it, so I made my own blend of spices including a little 5-spice, ginger, garlic powder, chili powder and sesame seeds. I did not measure, just kept adding a dash here and there until I thought it looked good.

Starting off with this recipe, preheat your oven to 400º F. Next wash and pat dry your chicken wings.

Space the wings out over an oven safe rack. I used a baking sheet lined with foil under by cookie cooling grate. It worked perfectly and the foil made clean up of the baking sheet easy. The cookie grate took more work to get clean with the chicken cooked on it.

Back again for another mealtime monday! This week I am sharing a simple recipe that we like to bring in the mix from time to time. Back when we lived in San Francisco, our favorite pizza was the pesto sausage from Amici’s. Now that we can’t walk over and pick one up, we came up with an easy recipe for a pesto sausage flatbread pizza.

Happy Mealtime Monday! It has been a busy couple of weeks! Spent a week in South Lake Tahoe, went back to work for a couple days, flew out to Indianapolis for a conference and then went to a co-workers wedding last night. Talk about two exhausting weeks! I’ll try my best to get a few pics up of the trips this week. Today I am sharing a great Rachel Ray recipe, honey mustard sesame chicken tenders.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup dijon mustard

1/2 cup honey

3 tablespoons finely chopped chives

1tablespoon Sriracha hot sauce

2 eggs

1.5 pounds of chicken breast tenders

1/2 cup almonds

1 cup panko crumbs

1/4 cup sesame seeds

Vegetable oil

Preheat over to 275 degrees. Place baking sheet in oven. In a bowl mix together mustard, honey, chives and hot sauce. Split the sauce in half between two bowls. Set one bowl aside to be the dipping sauce.

With the other half of the mixture, add two eggs. Beat to combine.

So now you should have one bowl of sauce, one reserved for later and the other (with eggs) to use to coat the chicken breasts for breading.

In a food processor or blender, grind the almonds.

You want to make sure that there are no larger almond pieces so that it works as breading.

Now mix together the ground almonds, panko crumbs and sesame seeds. This will be the breading for the chicken tenders.

Toss the chicken tenders into the mixture with egg in it.

Stir around to make sure the are coated well.

One by one, bread the chicken tenders in the nut-breadcrumb mixture.

Continue until all chicken tenders are coated.

Heat a layer of oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add some chicken tenders to the pan.

Continue frying in batches until all your chicken tenders are nicely browned on both sides.

Place chicken tenders on the heated baking sheet and pop into the oven for about 15-20 minutes or until cooked through.

Serve with the honey mustard dipping sauce reserved from the beginning of this recipe and enjoy! We ate them as a dinner with a side of fruit, but they are also a great served as an appetizer.

Welcome back to Mealtime Monday! Today we have a really quick and easy meal that can be made as part of a dinner or as an appetizer. I figured it made since to post an easy meal this week while we are enjoying vacation in South Lake Tahoe.

All you will need for ingredients are:

Parmesan cheese

Italian bread crumbs

1-2 eggs

Ravioli (preferably larger sized ones)

Crack your eggs into one bowl and whip. Pour a nice heap of bread crumbs in another bowl and add about 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese. Mix together.

Dip each ravioli into the egg…

then into the breadcrumb mixture to coat.

Heat cooking oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the breaded raviolis.

Cook until brown, then flip to other side and repeat. Remove from pan onto a paper towel to soak up excess oil. Serve and enjoy. I had pesto and a roasted tomato sauce and thought they made great dipping sides.

Such a quick and easy meal or fantastic appetizer. Now, back to vacation. Check out the beauty of South Lake Tahoe by following me on instagram